From Tapestried Villa to Sylvan Glade, Aristocratic Women in Love

I Am Love

Tilda Swinton, as a Russian matriarch married into a wealthy Milanese family, with Edoardo Gabbriellini, as a young chef.Credit
Magnolia Pictures

Amid all the luxuries on display in the Italian film “I Am Love” — the chandeliers, tapestries and paneled walls, the paintings, statuary and white-gloved servants — nothing holds your gaze as forcefully as Tilda Swinton’s alabaster face. The first time you see that vision, her character, Emma Recchi, a Russian who’s married into a wealthy Milanese family, is stage-managing the lavish birthday party that opens the film. By the end of this often soaringly beautiful melodrama, which closes with a funeral, Emma’s face will have crumpled into a ruin. But it will also be fully alive, having been granted, like Pygmalion’s statue, the breath of life.

“I Am Love,” directed by Luca Guadagnino, tracks that metamorphosis with surging, insistent music by John Adams and a lush visual style that could be called postclassical Hollywood baroque. Since the movie had its premiere last year at the Venice Film Festival, the name Luchino Visconti, the Italian director of operatic narratives about the European aristocracy, including “The Leopard,” has been ritualistically invoked as a touchstone. While Mr. Guadagnino has most assuredly absorbed Visconti into his system, he is also schooled in Alfred Hitchcock’s thrillers, Douglas Sirk’s melodramas and what were once disparagingly called women’s pictures, stories of female suffering and sacrifice, a genre that the critic Molly Haskell memorably associated with “wet, wasted afternoons.”

It takes some time for the tears to flow in “I Am Love,” which initially registers as somewhat arid and analytic in its initial near-ethnographic scrutiny of a social class most of us only read about in glossy lifestyle magazines. The film opens with an elaborate Christmastime birthday dinner for the Recchi patriarch, Edoardo (Gabriele Ferzetti), a celebration that requires a fleet of uniformed servants. Working with the cinematographer Yorick Le Saux, Mr. Guadagnino at first lets loose the camera, which prowls around the house, sweeping over the rich interiors, where Emma and her close aide and perhaps only friend, Ida (Maria Paiato), are putting the finishing touches on an affair that has all the intimacy of a coronation.

That evening Edoardo shocks the family by announcing that he’s leaving its textile business not only to his son, Tancredi (Pippo Delbono), as expected — Tancredi is the name of the nephew played by Alain Delon in “The Leopard” — but also to his grandson Edo (Flavio Parenti). The news startles everyone, though no one offers a critical word, including Edo, an elegant beauty with the wet eyes of a fawn and the casual grace that comes with a lifetime of privilege. A warm, open presence, he comes across as the most sympathetic of the Recchis, initiating our way into a family whose wealth and traditions are so exotic that it’s almost a surprise everyone isn’t wearing period costumes.

The sense that you are watching a bygone era is underscored by what later happens to the Recchi family business, a subplot that leads to a sleek boardroom in London and murmurings about globalization. Mr. Guadagnino does better when he keeps his focus on Emma, whose personality is at first obscured by her roles as a young matriarch. Gradually, another woman emerges as if from a sleep, an awakening provoked by her discovery that her daughter, Elisabetta (Alba Rohrwacher), has fallen in love with a woman. Instead of putting words in Emma’s mouth, Mr. Guadagnino lets his star react to the news as if she were alone without a camera: the beat of her breath changes, and her eyes widen with wonderment.

But while Emma’s outward response seems relatively muted, she has been irrevocably shaken. Elisabetta’s declaration augurs an equally profound transformation in Emma, who shortly thereafter begins an affair with a young chef — and Tancredi’s friend — Antonio (Edoardo Gabbriellini). The initiation of the affair sends Emma into an ecstatic reverie, though Mr. Guadagnino actually seems even more turned on. The liaison begins one day after Emma goes to visit Elisabetta and instead accidentally catches sight of Antonio. Emma secretly follows him, Mr. Adams’s music accompanying her much as Bernard Herrmann’s music once attended James Stewart as he tracked Kim Novak in “Vertigo.” (Emma’s hair is styled into a soft scoop that echoes Ms. Novak’s blond swirl in that movie.)

The chase ends in a sylvan perch, where Antonio and Emma make love amid a cacophony of bird calls and a flurry of close-ups of luscious flowers being ravaged by insects. It’s a sublimely beautiful interlude and a touch ridiculous, bringing to mind the blooms of a portentous rose bush in D. H. Lawrence’s “Sons and Lovers” that “expanded in an ecstasy,” a prelude to later forest rutting. Here, the flora and fauna constitute an alternative reality far from the villa that has become Emma’s sarcophagus and which will at last inspire at least one bird to take flight. As the working-class seducer, Antonio serves a Lawrentian stud function, though truth be told, he’s the kind of sensitive beefcake (he cooks and fulfills her sexually) familiar to readers of women’s romantic fiction, who, like Emma, enjoy their afternoons wet and wasted.

Directed by Luca Guadagnino; written by Barbara Alberti, Ivan Cotroneo, Walter Fasano and Mr. Guadagnino, based on a story by Mr. Guadagnino; director of photography, Yorick le Saux; edited by Mr. Fasano; music by John Adams; production designer, Francesca di Mottola; costumes by Antonella Cannarozzi, Jil Sander and Fendi; produced by Mr. Guadagnino, Tilda Swinton, Alessandro Usai, Francesco Melzi d’Eril, Marco Morabito and Missimiliano Violante; released by Magnolia Pictures. In Italian, with English subtitles. Running time: 2 hours. This film is not rated.

A version of this review appears in print on June 18, 2010, on page C8 of the New York edition with the headline: From Tapestried Villa to Sylvan Glade, Aristocratic Women in Love. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe